Moving discussion of VC over to this thread, now that we can actually play it.

Haven't gotten into it yet (maybe tonight), but oh man, it's one of those games where you have to configure the controls outside of the game entirely. Ugh. NOT a setup I'm a fan of. I want to be able to test the damn controls! I don't even know how half of these will mesh in practice yet. It's a minor thing, but talk about a lazy port (hopefully there won't be other issues from lazy porting).

Actually the VC release is pretty timely. I had gotten up to December 7th in P3P and then realized I missed the one and only opportunity to activate Ryoji's social link (I'm not trying to max everything by any means, but I did want to do that one!), so I had to go back to a save from October 29th or something and will have to re-grind alllllllll of block 5 Jesus Christ. The grinding isn't half so bad as some other jrpgs, but it is absolutely still grinding and no fun at all. I think I spend only about 1/3rd of my time playing it having any fun (i.e. the time spent not grinding Tartarus), so having to re-do those hours pretty much means I'm happy to take a long break from the game and finish it some other time.

One question I had though - how much social link time do you get through to the end of January? There area number of folks I have up around 8 at the end of October (Akihiko, Junpei, Yukari... actually the reason I skipped Ryoji that one day in class was because I wanted to get Yukari to MAX that day) who I want to finish before the end of the game. Basically my goal is to make sure I at least MAX my SEES crew (so Mitsuru will also need time come November, but I think she's mostly on alternate days, thankfully. Fuuka and Koro-chan already done because they come up so often and Ken should be easy because he has no competition at night).

Mongrel wrote:Haven't gotten into it yet (maybe tonight), but oh man, it's one of those games where you have to configure the controls outside of the game entirely. Ugh. NOT a setup I'm a fan of. I want to be able to test the damn controls! I don't even know how half of these will mesh in practice yet. It's a minor thing, but talk about a lazy port (hopefully there won't be other issues from lazy porting).

I like that the controls are mostly customizable, but there inexplicably doesn't seem to be a way to remap Start (at least, not by that name). As in "Press Start" at the title screen. And its default mapping on my Cordless Rumblepad 2 is, for some reason, to pressing the right stick in.

Other than that, it's very nice that it supports the Rumblepad 2 right out of the box with no need for x360ce. It even displays the buttons as numbers instead of letters, which...well, I've got mixed feelings about that. It's really nice that someone went to the trouble to make the game actually accurately reflect what the buttons on my controller say, but it's not like I've got it memorized which button is 1, 2, 3, 4, ..., 12. It would almost be easier if it used the "A", "B", "X", "Y", etc. designations, except those have moved around so goddamn much by various console designers that it's hard to keep track of which one's A and which one's B (and don't get me started on X, which is the top button on Nintendo systems, the left one on Dreamcast/Xbox, and the bottom on the PlayStation family). At least a game like this doesn't require the split-second precision of, say, the Arkham series, and you can look down at your controller for a second without fucking up a combo or something.

Also, it would sure be fucking nice if developers could settle on whether the right button is Accept and the bottom button is Cancel or the other way around. I know I can switch them in this game, but there are still plenty of games where you can't. (I know that part of this is down to the aforementioned switching around of A and B from one console to another, but there sure are a fuck of a lot of PlayStation games that use O as cancel and X as Accept, which is quite clearly the opposite of why those symbols were chosen for those buttons.)

The default video settings are kind of baffling. My HTPC isn't a very high-end machine (2009 Pentium processor, 4GB RAM, graphics card I bought used for $100 at Bookman's) but I maxed out all the settings and haven't had any issues.

It WOULD be nice to be able to fuck around with this stuff in-game. Even the stuff that IS in the in-game options menu doesn't appear to be accessible during the battles; I discovered partway through the tutorial section that yes actually I DID want to invert the right stick on both modes, but couldn't find a way to get to the menu (in battle, the menu button (4/X/Y/Triangle!) pulls up information on enemies).

Also, if the narrator could prounce "Gallia" consistently from one sentence to the next that would probably help.

Having not played the game yet, I am really interested in finding out why the default controls suggest using WASD, the arrow keys, AND a mouse. Am I expected to play with two hands and a foot? Or maybe some other appendage?

“During its first 24 hours on sale, blew all forecasts and predictions out of the water. The award-winning Strategy RPG, originally released in 2008 for PlayStation 3, forced its way to the top of the Steam download charts, beating a host of brand new games to reach number one,” Sega said.

Also I'm definitely moving these posts into a VC topic when I have some time later tonight.

I forget, have they talked about releasing 2 and 3 on PC as well? If they haven't before, I've got to figure they're at least thinking about it now.

Hell, there's got to be somebody at least talking about Skies of Arcadia. And maybe even the PlayStation 2 remakes of Phantasy Star 1&2 (full names used due to confusingly similar acronyms). Not that I'd hold my breath for any of those, but I bet somebody's putting together some cost/benefit charts right about now; SoA is already fully localized, and, assuming they don't want to use the original English text for PS1&2, those games are still pretty light on text. Most expensive thing would be adding widescreen support, and if they didn't want to fuck around with that, it seems like they'd be pretty simple ports, of the type Sega dumps out pretty frequently as it is.

Another thought: do you suppose this will mean fewer exclusives from Sega, or more? You could argue that they could have made twice as much money on PC if they'd given the game a simultaneous release with the PS3 version -- but of course that assumes demand would have been the same. When in fact demand has actually been increased substantially by (1) the game's previous scarcity and (2) the low price (including some very good sales from multiple vendors). I think keeping the game as a sought-after single-platform exclusive for 6 years and then releasing it as (1) a budget-priced title (2) during a holiday buying season where (3) it's not being eclipsed by the latest RPG from Bethesda probably ratcheted demand for the game up way beyond what it would have been in 2008.

VC2 maybe, but VC3 and the PS remakes never saw translations, which means a PC port would involve actual work. Even judging by the complaints leveled in this thread (no effort to compress the music to reduce storage, no effort to change the options interface within the game to allow remapping), one does not get the sense Sega put a lot of effort into this port.

At the end of the day this is still a company that's been sitting on an English translation of PSO2 for two years. I wouldn't get my hopes up.

While VC does sort of an introduce an "all bets are off" example when it comes to PC ports, I still wouldn't get too optimistic about seeing a lot of Japanese PS2 era games showing up. A port from last-gen - even if it is a PS3 exclusive with a custom engine - is a lot easier than from back when consoles were still mostly made of highly unique hardware.

That said, SEGA did port both Phantasy Star Online and Phantasy Star Universe back in the day, so maybe they still have that engine kicking around somewhere.

pacobird wrote:VC2 maybe, but VC3 and the PS remakes never saw translations, which means a PC port would involve actual work.

True. If push comes to shove, I've got a PSP and could always track down the fan translation of VC3. And I've already got the fan translations of the Phantasy Star games. Like I said, though, those games are pretty light on text; localizing the original PS is a pretty far cry from localizing VC3.

pacobird wrote:Even judging by the complaints leveled in this thread (no effort to compress the music to reduce storage, no effort to change the options interface within the game to allow remapping), one does not get the sense Sega put a lot of effort into this port.

On the one hand, it's bigger than it seems like it needs to be and DOES have one of those annoying external configuration programs. (Then again, so do the Arkham games, and they're as big-budget as franchises get. And they don't even let you remap the fucking buttons without manually editing a goddamn ini file. VC shows a lot more care than that.) On the other, it supports my outdated DirectInput controller out of the box and even labels the buttons correctly in the tutorials, and so far as I've played it's smooth as butter with the video settings maxed out on modest hardware.

Early indications are that it's got some rough edges but that they did take some time to make it work pretty well on PC.

Brentai wrote:While VC does sort of an introduce an "all bets are off" example when it comes to PC ports, I still wouldn't get too optimistic about seeing a lot of Japanese PS2 era games showing up. A port from last-gen - even if it is a PS3 exclusive with a custom engine - is a lot easier than from back when consoles were still mostly made of highly unique hardware.

More highly unique than the Cell?

Brentai wrote:That said, SEGA did port both Phantasy Star Online and Phantasy Star Universe back in the day, so maybe they still have that engine kicking around somewhere.

Well, and they've ported rather a lot of Dreamcast games already. Like I said, I'm not going to hold my breath (particularly for the Phantasy Star remakes -- though those seem like they could make some money as phone ports); I'm just saying that someone in an office somewhere has got to be thinking about it at this point.

Turns out all that space is taken up by video, not audio. There's a "movie" folder with 74 files in it, totalling 14.9 gig. Quick investigation (VLC can play them) reveals that they are, in fact, all the cutscenes, as people have reported. I'm not sure if the movies are a holdover from the PS3 version or if they decided they needed to record them all for some inscrutable reason. The weird thing is that the cutscenes look really weirdly aliased in comparison to the PS3 (going off of recordings on YouTube) and of course aren't as good as the PC's in-game graphics running at 1080p. My best guess at this point is that it really was like that on PS3, but the videos ended up looking nicer on that system because of the way it upscaled 720p content. I wouldn't be too surprised if a mod showed up soon that makes them look more smoothed out.

As you can see, I am posting ITT at 6 am, which gives you a rough idea of how much I already like VC. Man, the game's barely started - I just unlocked the HQ - and I already know I'm going to be sad when there are no more missions to play!

It's not often you can wait the better part of a decade for a game and actually have it exceed expectations.

I think I have her in my opening pool. Not sure if she was one of the ones I selected (part of the reason I was up so late was I hit a point of "Okay. That's a good start. Time to go to bed because it is way late." and right at that moment the HQ unlocked and you HAVE to pick a squad and welp.

EDIT: Oh yeah, her! She was one of the first ones I picked. She's got great abilities. Mainly I avoided Chatty Cathys like the plague. The other negatives seem manageable, but that's one that seems like it could get really awkward.

Also, I was getting crashes so severe on exit (mouse vanishes, can't properly use task manager even with keyboard only) I thought this was going to turn into a mess, but playing it in windowed mode seems to work alright (and I didn't lower the resolution to do so, I have it at 1680 x 1050 either way, so whatever). I mean, most Steam games I own crash on exit, but usually all you do is close the little box and who cares (I've never been able to fix the problem no matter how many times I reinstall Steam or update drivers/Windows, etc., but I doesn't really matter other than an extra mouse click on game exit). This however was new.

Brentai wrote:Turns out all that space is taken up by video, not audio. There's a "movie" folder with 74 files in it, totalling 14.9 gig. Quick investigation (VLC can play them) reveals that they are, in fact, all the cutscenes, as people have reported. I'm not sure if the movies are a holdover from the PS3 version or if they decided they needed to record them all for some inscrutable reason. The weird thing is that the cutscenes look really weirdly aliased in comparison to the PS3 (going off of recordings on YouTube) and of course aren't as good as the PC's in-game graphics running at 1080p.

Welp, that's just awful and bizarre, but I guess not THAT surprising in a game of its vintage. Wasn't Mass Effect the game that popularized in-engine cutscenes? And it came out in '07.